Thats how he came upon the San Joaquin. When its Pablos turn, he hands Hussein a check for $437, and Hussein counts out $433 back to him in cash. Only after the media were alerted did Stewart and Lynda claim to have discovered the clear-cutting. Each bush is saddled with more than a hundred pomegranates the size of softballs and baseballs. Lets call it what it is, he says. Vidovich digs 17 new wells, several to the depth of 1,400 feet, and pumps groundwater into ditches and canals that move the flow across miles of flat lake bed. If I follow them north through Resnick pomegranates, I can find out where the water is coming from. All told, 36 men operating six machines will harvest the orchard in six days. Its an economy of scale on a scale no ones ever tried here. Hes smiling but speaks only Spanish. That breaks your agreement with those farmers. Rather, it is the authority vested in Wonderful that counts. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. Bernards eyes are fixed straight ahead. Then the autumn of 2016 arrives with the strangeness of clouds. I did not name the town, Lynda says. Facebook gives people the power to. The bells in the churches pealed, and out came the villagers with their scythes and axes, believing they had found the reason for their poverty. John Vidovich. He gambled on the price of nuts going up, and he gambled on the water never going dry. She is the brander of the empire, the final word on their Super Bowl ads, the creator of product marketing. Get a D&B Hoovers Free Trial. She remembers handing the boy to her sister-in-law, who carried phony papers, and watching them cross by bridge into California. The dam ends up holding and the levees, too. The room smells of Vicks VapoRub. Theyre our future, she says. The designers at the Mint made a porcelain doll with a tiny replica outfit so precise that it had to be hand-beaded with 2,000 fake pearls. Four tribes of Yokut lived along its shores. Fiefdom. Comprehensive company profiles. The project seemed simple: Using existing canals and new 48-inch pipe, he would ship water 10 miles from his property in Lemoore to property south of Stratford. Drought turning to floodit is the story of California. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. That still leaves the majority of the workforce beyond his cajole. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. So everybody should have it, right? A restaurant built by Wonderful for the purpose of making the company town look better from the roadside may enjoy a more forgiving bottom line than, say, the Subway up the road. Its gone, I say. What the Resnicks were doing for Lost Hills, though, was a level of philanthropy I had never witnessed in the valley. Water rights are like democracy, he told Forbes in 1989. Manhattan was 30 minutes in one direction; the Jersey Shore, 30 minutes in the other. He could collect the rents while he slept. Since. He studied the situation. See All Contacts. Right there in the big canal of the Dudley Ridge Water District. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. Marketplace host Amy Scott spoke with Mark Arax, who wrote an articlein The California Sunday Magazine about the Wonderful Companys farming business and issues of sustainability in the Central Valley. I pity the outsider trying to make sense of it. Theres Cheat Death for their antioxidant-rich pomegranate juice and Get Crackin for their pistachios and Untouched by Man for their Fiji water. You and I look at this meal, he says. I ask him about his delivery of servicespruning, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, waterthat can be calibrated and timed to enable the smallest unit to achieve maximum yield. They do that because they love it., A POM craze followed. The wildfires cant be far behind. He is a single man who rents a bedroom from other family members for $150 a month. Since it is also true that Lost Hills has belonged to the Resnicks for 30 years, one of us might have blurted out, What took you so long to find it? As the film runs to credits, I can see that one credit is missing. Vidovich, in 2009, according to media reports, sold the rights to 14,000-acre-feet of state water from a . The sellers include farmers in the Tulare Lake basin who are pumping so much water out of the ground that the levees protecting the town of Corcoran are sinking, not by inches but by feet. She seems a little nervous waiting in the wings. I learned back then that our farmers thought the whole world was out to screw them. It wasnt a midlife crisis, he told me. Theyre now building an $80 million charter-school complex in Delano, just down the road from Cesar Chavez High. He makes $10.75 an hour. But thats not an issue I deal with., I dont even know what it was, to be honest with you.. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. Lynda sent the first batches of POM, week after week, as gifts to David Bowie, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney head Michael Eisner. Eat a corn tortilla instead, she urges. When I got out of law school, I probably had 100 people I was employing.. By then, Wonderful, if it still exists, will be a portfolio run by men even farther away than Beverly Hills. Youre the one who leads the way on selling agricultural water to the cities. Like other small farmers, my water stays on my ground. Compulsive gambler and alcoholic. This was Lost Hills, where the people are dependent on the Resnicks from cradle to grave. He emptied the sky of tens of millions of geese and drained the 800 square miles of Tulare Lake dry. I park the car and walk across the barren rows. This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. When the mansion was built in 1927, it was known as the Sunset House. I find a former partner of Resnick. Today is quincena day, twice-a-month payday, and he needs me to scram because the workers coming in to cash their checks and wire 25 percent back across the border to families in Guanajuato and Guerrero will wonder if Im with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mr. Vidovich was a descendant of one of the pioneer farm families that settled here from Croatia . I feel his gaze going past me, his voice turning oddly sentimental. We produced a short documentary film. Rubbish, said Vidovich, in a Los Altos office decorated with maps of his land holdings. What kind of empire are you trying to build?, Im here to show the farmer that ags footprint needs to get smaller., I chew on his answer for a second. Boswell has been the aggressor for years. On the south end stands the Wonderful Community Center, where residents are urged to attend thrice-weekly Zumba and core-training sessions, healthy cooking classes, and weekend cultural outings featuring the likes of Americas Premier Latino Dance Company. When John Vidovich was appointed as fire marshal in September 2014, he was given the difficult task of cleaning up the city of L.A.'s stubbornly antiquated Fire Prevention Bureau, making it more . I come upon a Wonderful field man in a four-by-four truck who listens to my bewilderment and takes pity. So off the developers went in search of farm water. My husband would have been shot dead like the others, but he was lucky. Many are here without documents, after all. And so that water was feedingResnick pistachios and almonds and keeping them alive in the worst of the drought. Youre the one who needs to see., We pull out of the parking lot, past the palm trees and roses, and head up the thin ribbon of Highway 33 into the dust-swirling tunnel of nuts and fruits. He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. When he first planted seedless mandarins in the valley 17 years ago, the bees from the citrus orchards around him were flying into his groves, pollinating his flowers, and putting seeds into the flesh of his fruit. Six hundred and forty acres dont look like 640 acresa square mileuntil they start ripping out the trees. His first wife, the mother of his two sons and daughter, told him she was quite happy living in their $30,000 condo in Culver City. And like other of the regions water barons present and past Resnick and Boswell Vidovichs last name is a sort of shorthand in coffee shop chatter from Delano to Easton. 16: Emmanuel Forbes, CB, Mississippi State My take: Washington entered the draft wanting to take a corner or an offensive lineman in the first round. Their houses made from railroad boxcars have been painted purple, blue, yellow, and gold. Shell check in every so often to see how business is going. Its going to be what its going to be. As a consequence, the farmland here, nearly 100,000 acres planted in permanent crops, is completely reliant on the governments supply of mountain water. On our trips to Disneyland, I must have blinkered my eyes heading down 99. The speech of his parents and grandparents, the Yiddish-inflected New York with its humors and cut-to-the-quick impatiences, had not left his own speech in the half-century since hed come to California. Through the haze I can see the knoll of the aqueduct come closer. Im here to show the farmer that ags footprint needs to get smaller.. The Spanish rice isnt rice but cauliflower made to look like rice. Another intrepid California billionaire named John Vidovich, scion of the Vidovich fortune, has a different path forward for the Golden State, one that he's established in his own land and water grabs. I cross the Tulare County line heading south into Bakersfield, and there in front of me, for no eye to miss, stands the Wonderful Citrus complex with its four-story storage building designed in the shape of an almighty box of Halo mandarins. In a swirl of dust, a worker atop a different machine is blowing the almonds from their spot beneath the trees to the middle of the row. The courtship of Stewart and Lynda went fast. I waited five years before placing another call to his headquarters. Inside, a trainer watches over a line of treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes. A cross of Jesus hangs from the bedpost. He doesnt know about the pipeline. We cant insist on wellness the way we can insist on plant safety. Shes designing the curriculum.. One of the neighbors watched in disgust as the bulldozers tore into the hillside. Theres no garbage piled high and smoldering, no chickens picking at scratch. This must be the spot the Wonderful field man was describing. This is Twisselman. I leave Gabbys and follow a winding concrete path through the new Wonderful Park. It is one more way to extend the brand. The fight between the Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by the J.G. These are donations from other farmworker families, but theyre not for her and Manuel and the kids. John Vidovich, the current patriarch of the family business, and his wife Lydia live in an $11.4 million Los Altos Hills home. It alleged that Vidovich broke state law by not doing an environmental review of the project. If he were on the scene today, hed have to add sashed Queens to the list. They have no way to grasp the $50 million to $80 million a year that the Resnicks say they are spending on philanthropy. Hed been diagnosed with early prostate cancer and had no doubt that the juice was keeping him well. This is a magnitude of intervention that no other agricultural company in California has ever attempted. "Stakes are higher than ever," Myers told CNBC. A road will pick up and connect me to where the tube is going. (SJV Water/ Lois Henry) A large water pipeline being built near Lemoore in Kings County is raising eyebrows as much for its possible uses as for the name associated with its construction John Vidovich. We pile back into the van and head up the road. Now its the seven-week nut harvest that brings out the inhalers. The Sotos made a name for themselves in Lost Hills by taking their taco trucks into the agricultural fields. Let the smaller grower walk among his trees and farm by the row. Upon graduation, he only needed to look across the Raritan River to find his college. Vidovich needs the pipe to move water. To fix the subsidence, and keep the town dry in the next flood, residents and the state prison are having to pay $10 million in extra taxes. Altogether, Resnick has purchased 300,000 acre-feet of water from farmers and water districtsat a cost of $200 millionto cover his shortfall during the drought. Each face wears its own weary. How much bigger can agriculture get. And you know why? Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. Groundwater agencies up and down the San Joaquin Valley had to file plans with the Department of Water Resources earlier this year showing . More recently, he earned $40 million in an easement deal with a water bank and exchange that seeks to siphon flood water out of a Kings County canal for storage in Kern County. I thank him and hurry down the dirt road through the almonds, eyeing the rearview mirror to see if a Resnick truck is following me. It was like being in the middle of a hurricane.. As the nuts pour down onto the roof of the catcher, the operator shifts the trough so that it becomes a conveyor belt. Since the middle of the drought, the price of almonds has dropped almost by half. Back then, the Los Angeles Times had a bureau in the middle of California. When a farmers orchards encompass 186 square miles, finding the field man can be a challenge. Hes a decent guy making $216,000 a year who doesnt pretend that he isnt beholden to Wonderful. The bloodless ones stay away. He got into UCLA and joined a Jewish fraternity. And then what happens in drought is there is this desperation to keep it going. Stewart refers to the occasional trek between Lost Hills and Beverly Hillsroughly 140 milesas a carpetbaggers distance. It seems even longer, he says, if you add in the psychological distance of being an East Coast Jew in a California farm belt where Jews are few and far between. Ive gone too far. Wonderful has enough water to irrigate its orchards in Lost Hills and park tens of thousands of acre-feet in the water bank. I enter an equipment yard where a Wonderful farmhand is standing next to a tractor. He blames Iran. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. This is a big crop, the field man tells me. Where do you begin with a man of great riches if not the distant places you might have in common? Theyre just mad Im here, he said. It takes a life every six seconds. But a controversial pipeline sits empty, as dry as dust, caught in an angry feud between two of Californias largest land barons, Silicon Valley developer and farmer John Vidovich and Pasadena-based longtime cotton king J.G. In a region of wall-to-wall plantings, one of the walls is crashing down. So now theyre doing everything they can to frustrate my ability to utilize the property, said Vidovich. One more hour and Im outta this fucking place.. Boswells team predicts huge harm. Look, these farmers go back two, three, and four generations. One of the first things he did with his monopoly was kill the California Pistachio Commission, the industrys marketing group, by yanking his funding. Its John Vidovich. The pipeline project is suspended while the two sides battle in court. A husband and wife sharing the reins is rare for corporate America, rarer still for industrial agriculture. Roll Corp. was ranked #246 on Forbes' list of America's largest private companies in 2008 and had an estimated revenue of $1.98 billion in 2007. . I call the manager of the Lost Hills Water District. Boswell pumps reach 2,500 feet into the earth looking for water to grow crops, looking for water to sell. I know I cant do this forever, he says. Vidovichs supporters like Wilson say he loves to help people, donating laptops to the struggling Stratford school district and inviting local Native Americans to his property to harvest reeds and teach basket-weaving traditions. I grab my notebook and walk up to one of the vans. Relatives arranged his passage, paying the coyote the new rate of $12,000. The curtains were made of a fabric woven in Venice and substantial enough that they might finish off a person who happened to be looking out the window in the throes of an earthquake. In the summer of 2010, hed spent several days documenting the deplorable conditions of the modern company town. Carls Jr., Subway, McDonalds, Wendys, Loves, or Arbys. Then hed lose his temper and get the strap out.. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. Wages that used to go to workers stay in the pocket of the nut growers. Im in another land, an expanse of hard, ugly, cratered-out earth the color of sand. Section, block, and row dont compute; he has to direct me by cellphone and guideposts. Since then, his Sandridge Partners has accumulated ownership or control of thousands of acres of farmland across the Central Valley 123,424 in Kings County alone, per ParcelQuest, focusing on land with secure surface water rights or where groundwater is abundant. So the way Pablo uses own isnt necessarily a pejorative. His bar was a place for guys, Damon Runyontype guys., Resnicks pals were all Jewish kids from upper-class families, so it wasnt easy being the poorest one, the one whose father was a gambler and capable at any moment of losing the few comforts they had. She graduated from Duke University with a BA degree in biology. And Vidovich ended up pumping water an extraordinary amount of water out of . During the holiday season, they sent out 4,000 gift boxes to their nearest and dearest friends filled with their fruits and nuts, along with a card of the two of them dressed in skin-colored body stockings, posing as Adam and Eve. "Water rights are like democracy," he told Forbes in 1989. Its gone. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. And now Vidovich is the aggressor, said Doug Verboon, a Kings County supervisor and walnut farmer who works the same 187 acres that his grandfather bought in 1906. . Then the drug cartels took over the countryside and planted poppies. Like J.W. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. As it happened, just down the road, on the other side of the lake bottom, Resnick had captured his own body of water, the Kern Water Bank, and planted millions of nut trees on desert scrub. A balancing of books in an office in the city has decided that this orchard and others around it, covered by too little water, can go. Typically, each pound sells wholesale for $4.25. Before he left her to cross alone, he gave her soda, water, chips, and Cheetos. And how will the Resnicks fare? Im not going to live forever, even with the massive amounts of pomegranate juice Im drinking. Contact 2? Wild salmon and all these sides made from scratch. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I reached a moment in my life where I had to give back in a meaningful way, she tells the camera. Arrayed before him were small bowls of almonds, pistachios, and easy-to-peel mandarins, a plate of ground white turkey meat cooked in olive oil, and a glass of pomegranate juice. What happens to Wonderful? A member of the commission, on the eve of its demise, told me, Stewart wants to be a benevolent dictator. The believer and the skeptic do their tussle inside my head. Then he turned and faced me. And while Resnick and Vidovich have been at odds in the past over San Joaquin Valley water feuds especially centering on the appearance that Resnick was overly-familiar in his utilization of the Kern Water Bank the feud is long gone. He tells me to meet him in Lost Hills. What if I failed? Well still make money.. He brought great ideas to the table and helped make and then execute tough choices. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. Vidovich went on a shopping spree. His trees were drinking from the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, from rivers and irrigation canals and the water bank. The buyer? It should be right here, but I dont see it. John Vidovich made headlines - and a lot of enemies - in 2009 by permanently selling rights to 14,000-acre feet of state water from a Kings County water district to southern California for $73 million, according to media reports. She had recently divorced and wasnt about to settle for a life in Culver City. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. As she announces the newest gift, the men and women in the back of the crowd smile and applaud politely and try not to show their faces to the publicity crew she has brought with her to film the event. I stand over the pipes and give them a hard slap. Once, he came home from school and discovered the family car gone. The shelves spill piatas, gloves, hats, pruning shears, and loaves of Bimbo white bread. As the growers punch more holes into the ground looking for a vanishing resource, the earth is sinking. She was aiming to surround herself with famous actors and artists and public intellectuals. The rent is $540. Tracts of houses, Californias last affordable dream, civilize three or four exits, and then its back to the open road splattered with the guts and feathers of chickens that jumped ship on the slaughterhouse drive. The concept changed the industry. She divorced her husband in 1968 and began dating Anthony Russo, who worked at the RAND think tank in Santa Monica with military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. His father, Stephen Vidovich, founded DeAnza Properties in 1966 and led the charge to convert the Santa Clara Valley from farmland and pave the way for Silicon Valley to become the hub of late-20th century and early-21st century American innovation. Because Lupe had no papers, she followed the coyote for many more miles until they reached a steep pass. Lupe gave birth to two daughters, U.S. citizens, who are now 11 and 6. Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. She won a gold Effie, advertisings Oscar. Its ridiculous, he said. Thanks to Wonderfuls $15 million Get Crackin campaignthe largest media buy in the history of snack nutspistachios now rank among the top ten bestselling salty snack items in the U.S. We are no longer processing nuts, he says. Yes, theyre still delivering water. Where gravity needs a boost, the pipes run atop wooden crates used to pack boxes of fruit. The borough measured no more than 2 square miles. What do you need to know, sir?, Whats it been like here during the drought?, Drought, no drought, makes no difference. This is gamblers ground unlike any other in California, and as I drive from hill to dale, examining each orchard, my head spins. Americas +1 212 318 2000. I had not seen any. He was tough on the outside. Just get started became one of his guiding principles. The knoll begins to rise. Scott: How sustainable is this operation given that California only recently came out of a long drought and may actually be headed there again soon? In his best Borscht Belt nasal, he takes a jab. Sandridge Partners, controlled by Vidovich, is building a 10-mile-long route on its properties to ship water from its wells in the north to its thirsty fields in the south. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. Angiola has become a critical element of Vidovichs water moves, transferring water across the Valley for additional sales, so much so that it put him and the district in hot water. But those 20,000 acres near the town of Pixley came with an endowment: a little spit of earth that produced endless amounts of groundwater. The wall of Pacifico and 16-ounce cans of Bud is rebuilt daily. Talk to me, Hussein says, draining a can of Rockstar. The Wonderful Company is located in Californias Central Valley where droughts hit frequently, but that hasnt stopped the company from harvesting record crops. The river is nothing if not fickle. We were asleep at the wheel. Boswell territory. The aquifer, a sea of water beneath the clay that dates back centuries, isnt bottomless. Sitting in his mansion in 2008, he already counted more than 100,000 acres of orchards across five counties. Burglar alarms, on the other hand, offered round-the-clock vigilance without coffee breaks. He was about my size, but he was very tough. VIDEO: Christmas wonderland featuring the Grinch . A piece of pipeline south of Stratford rests in the arm of a piece of heavy equipment on Dec. 16, 2021. I had finished the last chapter of The King of California, a book I wrote with a good friend about J.G. You look like Border Patrol undercover.. I think were going to see more of these fights break out over water among competing users, said Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law. I steer past Wasco to the dust-blowing orchards that flank Lost Hills, the densest planting of almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates on earth. The pistachio trees in Wonderful number 6 million. Four thousand peoplemore than double the number on the highway signlive in town, and three out of every four rely on a payday from Wonderful. The juice isnt selling like it used to. The man and his pincers cant be bothered. His father grew grapes, cherries, and apricots in the Santa Clara Valley . Lynda assisted her with the design and color scheme but otherwise has remained hands-off. We are sensitive to that. He worked as a gardener in Los Angeles and then heard about the almond trees on the other side of the mountain where the living was so much cheaper. This is the first installment of a new SUNLIGHT Series: Kings of the River, a review of the machinations and battles on the oft-overlooked Kings River. The brick-hard ground cant be bought. From now on, theyll grow on land that offers a double protection against drought. Shes built a grocery section in the back of the caf stocked with grapeseed oil and what she touts are Whole Foodsquality vegetables and fruits that sell at Walmart prices. Why grapeseed oil, I ask Andy Anzaldo, head of grower relations and a fitness buff, whos taken on the added duties of what might be called Wonderfuls Minister of Health. Each section of pipe is 40 feet long. Faced with scarcity, farmers are very protective of their pipes and canals, said Barton Buzz Thompson, a Stanford Law School professor and director of the universitys Water in the West program. We want good groundwater, too., You mean no more pipelines carrying water in the dead of night?, The pipeline. He stammers a bit. Who would have thought that people would be asking their bartender to fix them a Pomtini? he said. Order finds itself through action. Valuable research and technology reports. Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. For a long time, she got no credit. It exists as one thing they can almost rationalize out in the fields. More than half our employees are obese or near obese, Anzaldo tells me. It goes to doctors and nurses, trainers and dietitians, who track the weight of workers, prod them to exercise, and wean them off soda and tortillas. I feel too good to give any of it up.. California had passed a law intended to stop the rising of new towns in the middle of nowhere. He doesnt know what pipeline means. He does enough farming in the area to make it look like hes a farmer. They were pushing plates, costume jewelry, perfume, and model cars. Rethink Your Drink is the latest slogan. All the new water pours into the delta, and what doesnt go out to sea fills up the aqueduct again. Every last tree has been torn out of the ground. These trees are pruned by a machine that hedges one side and then the other, he says. The State Water Project that allowed western Kern County to grow into a farming behemoth has given no water or very little water over the past three years amid the worst drought in California history. Now the land is dry and saline, drained to support a vast and rigid geometry of nut, fruit and dairy farms. They were hardly the first rich people to use patronage to try to wheedle a citizenry toward their idea of a better life. Whether he realizes it, hes part of the biggest pistachio harvest in history. Were still trying to figure out who our typical customer is going to be, Angelica says. But this is water for Mr. Resnick. It might be nice if my kids and grandkids could turn to a book someday and read about what weve built., He and Lynda were changing the way food was grown in California and sold to the world. This is the route my grandfather, one of a legion of fruit tramps, took as he drifted from farm to farm in the 1920s picking crops. This is a company that runs its resources to the max, he tells me. There is nothing here, one of the townsfolk told Gibler. Once you have them, you spend a lifetime defending them..
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